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SWEDISH HISTORY

Sweden splashes out to save its unluckiest warship

Sweden is embarking on a colossal four-year project to safeguard a nearly 400-year-old warship that is the centrepiece of its famous Vasa Museum.

Published: 8 June 2024 11:21 CEST

Visitors walk in front of the Vasa warship at the The Vasa Museum in Stockholm. Sweden is embarking on a new project to safeguard the almost 400-year-old ship. (Photo by Viken KANTARCI / AFP)

The ship, one of Stockholm’s main tourist attractions, sank on its maiden voyage in 1628 and remained at the bottom of the sea until it was salvaged in 1961.

“We want Vasa to be preserved for the future,” project manager Peter Rydebjörk told AFP.

Despite the long delicate recovery operation, the ship “started to deteriorate faster” once it emerged from the sea after three centuries, he said.

In one of the most embarrassing naval calamities ever, the Vasa capsized only 15 minutes into its maiden voyage because of a design flaw, costing the lives of several dozen crew members.

Stopping the movement

After being protected by mud and the brackish waters of the Baltic Sea for three centuries, preserving it while on display at one of Stockholm’s most popular museums has proved more complicated.

The wood has contracted over the years, and the ship is being compressed due to gravity. It is also tilting slightly to port.

“We have to stop the movement,” Rydebjörk said.

Work on building a new support structure began in April to replace the fragile current one.

The first phase of the project, dubbed “Stötta Vasa” (Support Vasa), is to stabilise the wreck.

Then comes the creation of a structure to support its weight and finally the ship will be righted.

Steel skeleton

By 2028 — if all goes well — the hull will be supported both externally and internally and the current 17 external struts will be replaced by 27 steel cradles with fixings under the keel.

Because the Vasa currently has difficulty supporting its own weight, a type of steel skeleton will be installed inside the ship.

Rydebjörk said it has taken more than a decade of research to prepare for the ambitious project — which is expected to cost upwards of 200 million kronor ($19 million).

“It’s a really interesting job,” Rydebjörk added.

Despite its age, the ill-fated vessel is still well-preserved, with 98 percent of the original parts intact.

Polish tourist Lukasz Szyszka told AFP that the ship was in great condition and worth seeing, despite it being “freezing inside” the museum.

Its main hall is kept at a temperature of between 18 and 20 degrees Celsius (between 64 and 68 degrees Fahrenheit) with a humidity level of 55 percent to slow the deterioration.

The 43-year-old shopkeeper said work on the wreck was needed, saying it was also part of Polish history.

Swedish king Gustav II Adolf (1611-1632), who commissioned the Vasa, wanted to use it so he could to control Poland’s ports on the Baltic.

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A lot of people around the world, in particular North America to where hundreds of thousands of Swedes emigrated in the 18th and 19th century, have Swedish ancestors (turns out Taylor Swift may or may not be among them).

This article will take you through the basic steps of researching your family tree in Sweden.

Let’s concentrate on Sweden’s church books, which are by far your most useful resource. From the 17th century, priests were obliged to keep records on the residents in their parish, the main census bureau at the time, and Swedes do really love keeping records.

The best part is that these have all been digitised and are freely available from the National Archives of Sweden – the bulk of them online, and some even searchable, so you can look through them wherever you are in the world.

There are five main “books” that make up your key sources:

First, household examination records (husförhörslängder). Sweden today is very secular, but a few hundred years ago the Lutheran church was very powerful.

Parish priests between 1686 and the late 19th century used to visit their parishioners to quiz them on their knowledge of the Bible, literacy and knowledge of Luther’s Small Catechism – and mark them on their answers.

These visits were also an opportunity to make any updates to the official population records, so as outdated as they may seem today, as much of a goldmine are they for genealogy researchers.

The other four useful books are: lists of everyone who moved to and from a parish (inflyttnings- och utflyttningslängder), birth and christening records (födelse- och dopböcker), marriage records (lysnings- och vigselböcker), and finally the records of all deaths and funerals (död- och begravningsböcker).

So how do you go about tracking down a Swedish ancestor?

If you already know their name, date of birth or where in Sweden they were last registered as living, that goes a long way. But say you don’t have specific details, what can you then do?

I’m not a genealogy expert, so I will take you through this the way I would go about it.

Let’s try to track down my great, great grandfather on my father’s side.

From left, the article author, her father, great grandfather and grandfather. Photo: Private

You probably, like me, know your grandfather’s name. Chances are you probably also have some idea of roughly where and when they were born, even if you, like me, don’t know the specific year.

(I’m starting with my grandfather, but maybe your first Sweden-born ancestor was one of your great grandparents or even further back – hopefully you’ll find this imperfect example useful anyway)

In my case, I happen to know that my grandfather’s full name was Emil Verner Löfgren and that he was born in the region of Östergötland but spent most of his adult years in Blekinge.

But I don’t know his date of birth or death, which would help me track him down in the church books.

I start by going to the Swedish National Archives’ online search function and simply type in his name.

Helpfully, you can search in English, and in the screenshot below you can see some of the top results that come up: entries from the census, and old shipping rolls.

When I click on his name, I get enough information about him and his family that I can tell that it all adds up and I’ve found the right Emil Löfgren.

Screenshot: Swedish National Archives

Now, I got lucky. Emil spent a few years at sea in his youth, so he’s listed in the shipping rolls. They helpfully tell me his exact date of birth and his parents’ names, so I’ve already come a long way just by doing a quick online search.

In case you’re not as lucky, let’s pretend for the sake of this article that I only found him in the census. That tells me at least two crucial details: his year of birth and where he was born.

Screenshot: Swedish National Archives

It’s time now to abandon the online search and get digging through the church books, which conveniently are also online, but require you to search them manually. If you didn’t find your ancestor in the online search, you’ll have to go straight to the church books.

I want to find out Emil’s exact date of birth, so I go to the church archives on the National Archives’ homepage and search for Karlshamn.

I now get a long list of all the available church records from Karlshamn, but in this case I want the parish register from 1930 (församlingsbok – before 1895-ish known as the house examination book) where the above information tells me I can find Emil.

Helpfully, it also tells me exactly on which page of the parish register to look, so I track down the book and turn to page 2624.

Screenshot: Swedish National Archives

The screenshot above tells me Emil’s name (Verner is here spelled with a W – you may find spelling variations of the same person’s name, especially if your ancestor changed their name from, say, Karl/Carl to Charles), his profession, his exact date of birth, place of birth, that he’s been vaccinated against the smallpox, date of marriage and where he last appeared in the church books (under inflyttad eller överförd).

The last bit is helpful if I want to trace every step of Emil’s life, as it tells me that his previous entry was on page 3720 in the previous edition of the parish register from Karlshamn (where it says “G.b.” – meaning gamla boken, “old book”). But that’s not what I want to do right now.

Instead, I want to know the name of his father. I know that he was born on September 9th, 1884, in Ringarum.

Let’s go to the church books of Ringarum…

I now instead look for the birth and christening records (födelse- och dopböcker) from the year 1884. Because I have his date of birth, it’s relatively easy to flick through the pages and find him (note that births are listed in a rough, but not always exact, order). Even if you only have the year of birth, you may still find them this way, but it will take you longer as you’ll have to go through the whole year.

Screenshot: Swedish National Archives

So the above screenshot tells me when Emil was born, christened, and the names of his parents: Adolf Werner Löfgren Gåse (they’ve included his professional title at the time, a boatsman, båtsman, in the Swedish Navy) and Emma Charlotta Eriksdotter.

It also tells me where they were living at the time (a croft called Gåstorp) and, supremely helpfully, exactly what page to find them on in the house examination records (page 163), so that’s our next stop.

And just like that, I have Adolf’s date and parish of birth (Mogata, September 8th, 1858 – see the screenshot below), as well as the year he married (May 22nd, 1884, which mathematically skilled readers will note was, er, not more than nine months before Emil was born).

On the right, you also see his and his wife’s marks from the house examination sessions, i.e. their reading abilities and how well they know their Bible and Luther.

Screenshot: Swedish National Archives

If I were to take a closer look at Adolf’s life, it would tell me that after he retired as a boatsman, he worked as a shoemaker. His parents died when he was very young, so he was sold at a “child auction” – a way of boarding out orphans and poor children in 19th century Sweden.

At these auctions, the child was handed over to the lowest bidder – whoever was willing to provide for the child for the least money from the authorities. The foster parent was compensated by the state with an amount equal to the bid in return for providing the child with housing, food and education. How good a home they provided varied hugely and in some cases it was a way of acquiring cheap child labour.

But what I want to find out for the purpose of this article is the name of Adolf’s father, so I just repeat some of the steps above.

I now search for the church records for Mogata parish, and use Adolf’s date of birth to find him in the birth records.

The priest’s handwriting is getting harder and harder to read, but I can still make out the names of Adolf’s parents (föräldrar). His father was shoemaker Erik Johan Löfgren and mother Sofia Ulrika Nilsdotter. Also listed are his godparents (faddrar).

Screenshot: Swedish National Archives

So there you go. I’ve now found what I set out to: the name of my great, great grandfather.

If I were to go even further back, I would probably notice that Erik Johan was the first man in the family to hold the surname Löfgren.

Most Swedes before or around this time used patronymics. This is where surnames such as Andersson and Svensson come from; they originally literally meant “son of Anders” and “son of Svensson”, so every new son got his surname after his father. This changed in the 18th or early 19th century, when people either took a new name (like Löfgren) or started passing their old -son name to the next generation.

You’ll notice that for example Erik Johan’s wife held the surname Nilsdotter. This is because her father’s name was Nils.

I’ve now taken you through the easiest and cheapest way of tracing your Swedish ancestry. But you may hit stumbling blocks along the way. For example, it’s not uncommon for children a few hundred years ago to have been born out of wedlock with no official father listed.

There are plenty of other free and paid-for sites that could help you. Some of these are the Swedish genealogy forum Rötter, subscription sites such as Ancestry, My Heritage and the database Sveriges dödbok (literally: Sweden’s death book, searchable records of deaths and burials, which a lot of genealogy researchers swear by), and various Facebook groups (search for släktforskning – family research).

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